Tonight, quiet, having contemplated all evening the ends of empire—palaces and skyscrapers toppling over the precipice of time—and having been moved to melancholy by the moonlight beyond the window, I thought of the standing stone high in the moonlight of that other place thousands of miles away, and imagined a breeze slipping over the crescent moon and the stone flower and then passing over the skirted figures, who in their place on top of the world, night after night, year after year, their movements open only to the gaze of the blind universe, continue to dance.